La Stampa’s Asia editor Francesco Sisci offers a contrarian vision of a “Catholic ‘Destiny’ in China” on the newspaper’s blog today, predicting an early rapprochement between the Vatican and the Chinese government. China already has 130 million Christians, according to Chinese government estimates, Sisci reports, significantly more than the 70 million to 110 million range cited by most Western sources.

Christian conversion, though, is broad but shallow, Sisci reports:

Most just follow whichever pastor they meet out of “yuanfen,” or fate. Many of those pastors are self-taught, having read a translation of the Bible in Chinese. The translation may be not very accurate or done in a scholarly way. To this very weak Biblical background they add their own preaching, which is bound to draw more from the local Chinese lore (non-Christian) than from the Bible, simply because the Bible is not part of Chinese education or tradition. Many pastors mix Christianity with Taoism and Buddhism.

What explains the enormous rate of nominal conversion? According to Sisci,

. . . many of these new Chinese Christians are new converts to ‘modernity,’ which in China is largely tantamount to ‘Westernization’—or the American way of life. They pray to Jesus as they eat at MacDonald’s or Kentucky Fried Chicken. But just as they can’t eat hamburgers every day (and can’t digest cheese and can’t stand its smell), so they can’t take the pure overeducated Christianity, and even the purely American Presbyterians or Evangelicals are hard to swallow. In the same way they add soy sauce or rice vinegar to their food, to Evangelical faith they may add belief in feng shui (”wind and water,” traditional Chinese geomancy) and the Yijing (an ancient soothsayers’ manual).

To gauge the depth as well as the breadth of Christian conversion, Sisci argues, one has to focus on the Catholic population. He cautions, “If one takes a closer look at these numbers, little appears to have changed since 1949. The Catholics, even in the rosier estimates, are about 12 to 13 million, or 1 percent of China’s population, the same percentage as in 1949”. The question is, Sisci believes,

Can this tiny Catholic minority in China—which, anyway, is more numerous than the Catholics in extra-Catholic Ireland—be the backbone of a new Catholicism worldwide? Now more than ever: God knows. These Catholics have a very strong faith because they have converted twice: They accepted a religious tradition that is strange to them, and they have accepted a culture and rituals that are totally foreign.

The Chinese government attitude towards Christianity changed dramatically in 1999, Sisci notes, when the Falun Gong offered a challenge to modernization rooted in traditional Chinese beliefs. The government feared that a politically potent traditionalist movement might fill the spiritual void that emerged in China after Mao was discredited. Chinese Christianity presented a purely spiritual direction with no political ambitions or centralized structure, unlike Falun Gong, and the government viewed it benignly.

At the 2007 Communist Party Congress, Party Secretary Hu Jintao prasied the role of religion in building a “harmonious society.” Sisci foresees a new era of trust between China and the Holy See, following decades in which the government forced Catholics to join a “patriotic association” or work underground. He offers a detailed account of the state of Vatican-Chinese relations, arguing that

. . . there is growing trust between the two sides. China and the Holy See reached a common agreement for the man who became bishop of Beijing last year, after the demise of Fu Tianshan. Fu had been appointed by the government but not recognized by Rome. Conversely, in 2007, through intense consultations, Beijing and Rome jointly picked young Li Shan (born in 1965) for the prestigious and symbolic position of Bishop of Beijing, virtually the head of the Chinese Catholic Church.

Sisci is the author (with Fr. Francesco Strazzari) of a recent book on China’s relations with the Holy See, Santa Sede - Cina: L’incomprehensione antica, l’interrogativo presente.

In a medieval history class my junior year of college, our professor assigned us a book of the selected works of Bernard of Clairvaux. I found it to be the richest spiritual work I had ever read, and would later take Bernard as my confirmation name. Now re-reading Bernard’s sermons on the Song of Songs, the other day I came across a beautiful passage in Sermon 83 (the translation below comes from here):

Now the Bridegroom is not only loving; he is love. Is he honor too? Some maintain that he is, but I have not read it. I have read that God is love, but not that he is honor. It is not that God does not desire honor, for he says, ‘If I am a father, where is my honor? Here he speaks as a father, but if he declares himself to be a husband I think he would change the expression and say, ‘If I am a bridegroom, where is my love?’ For he had previously said, ‘If I am the Lord, where is my fear?’ God then requires that he should be feared as the Lord, honored as a father, and loved as a bridegroom. Which of these is highest and most lofty? Surely it is love. Without it fear brings pain, and honor has no grace. Fear is the lot of a slave, unless he is freed by love. Honor which is not inspired by love is not honor but flattery. Honor and glory belong to God alone, but God will receive neither if they are not sweetened with the honey of love.

Love is sufficient for itself; it gives pleasure to itself, and for its own sake. It is its own merit and own reward. Love needs no cause beyond itself, nor does it demand fruits; it is its own purpose. I love because I love; I love that I may love. Love is a great reality, and if it returns to its beginnings and goes back to its origin, seeking its source again, it will always draw afresh from it, and thereby flow freely. Love is the only one of the motions of the soul, of its senses and affections, in which the creature can respond to its Creator, even if not as an equal, and repay his favor in some similar way . . . Now you see how different love is, for when God loves, he desires nothing but to be loved, since he loves us for no other reason than to be loved, for he knows that those who love him are blessed in their very love.

The ringing declaration of God first and foremost as lover still strikes me, perhaps because it is a message of which I need constant reminding. The core of our relationship with God should not be guilt or fear or sorrow for our imperfections, but love. For love alone pleases God and brings freedom, life, and yet more love.

It’s not just the American mainline that is running dry; over at EPPC, George Weigel notes the latest divorce for Henry VIII’s ecclesial progeny: “England’s cause, and Anglicanism’s, are no longer thought to be the same.” Unfortunately, this arguable de facto split between the Church and society of England is not due to recent First Amendment importation or imposition; the British have not suddenly recognized the spiritual and social value of disestablishment:

“English = Protestant” has been replaced by a new equation: “English = Multiculturally P.C.” Evensong is still sung superbly in King’s College chapel, Cambridge; but the psalms and canticles echo amidst the real absence. Bunyan’s Pilgrim has come to an even deeper slough: not of despond, but of spiritual apathy and boredom.

Into that slough now rides Father Aidan Nichols, the distinguished English Dominican theologian. His small book, The Realm: An Unfashionable Essay on the Conversion of England, makes a bold claim about the past and a bold wager about the future: “England is in fact inseparable from Catholicism, unimaginable without it.”

Moreover, Father Nichols argues, to preach, teach, propose and invite the conversion of England is not bad manners, but true courtesy. Replying to a BBC interviewer who fretted that England’s return to the Catholic orbit would violate contemporary ecumenical and multiculturalist sensibilities, Nichols responded … :

“If Catholic Christianity conveys in human form the divine revelation which is the greatest truth, goodness and beauty man can know, then all the elements of truth, goodness and beauty in the theory and practice of other forms of Christianity and indeed in other faith traditions would attain their crown in this [Catholic] context, would come to their intended fulfillment.”

Father Nichols’ description of the cultural challenges of the New Evangelization after Vatican II rings true far beyond Land’s End: our problem today is less the new atheism than the new apathy, an apathy that has grown exponentially amidst uninteresting and soggy Christianity, material wealth, and the decline of any public consensus that some things are, simply, true.

Like those who will read him with appreciation here in the former colonies, Father Nichols also recognizes that the challenge of spiritual boredom in post-Christian culture cannot be met by Catholic Lite. It can only be met, and the 21st century world converted, by Catholicism in full.

Aidan Nichols’ Unfashionable Essay–published last February–is already sold-out. Perhaps the converstion, or reversion, of England is not so unfashionable after all.